There is a significant gap between the environmental outcomes the United States has pursued and the outcomes it has achieved, and the Colcom Foundation believes it knows why. The country has made genuine progress on reducing per-capita pollution and improving energy efficiency. What it has not done is keep pace with the ecological costs of a steadily expanding population. The foundation’s mission is built around closing that gap or at least naming it clearly enough that policy begins to take it seriously.
The foundation’s data makes the scale of the challenge concrete. Per-capita CO2 emissions fell 35 percent from 1970 to 2021. But U.S. population grew 62 percent over the same period. National emissions rose 15 percent overall. Per-capita biocapacity use fell more than 20 percent since 1970, yet total biocapacity consumption increased from 227 percent to 240 percent because there were roughly 127 million more people drawing on the country’s natural resources.
Goals Colliding With Demography
Colcom Foundation is particularly direct about what current population trajectories mean for major environmental targets. The Paris Climate Agreement requires significant national-level emission reductions. The 30×30 initiative requires protecting 30 percent of U.S. land for wildlife, up from the current 13 percent. The Half-Earth proposal calls for reserving half of Earth’s surface for other species. Each of these goals becomes harder to achieve the larger the U.S. population becomes.
The foundation projects that immigration will account for 103 million of the 110 million people added to the U.S. by 2065. At that scale, the country would be adding the equivalent of 8.5 Los Angeles metro areas each requiring housing, roads, infrastructure, and food production, all of which consume land and generate emissions.
A Foundation Betting on the Long View
The Colcom Foundation does not claim these problems are easy to solve or that its positions are without controversy. It does claim, consistently, that the environmental movement cannot succeed if it continues to treat population growth as a topic too difficult to address. Colcom Foundation funds conservation directly and funds immigration reform advocacy as parallel strategies a dual approach that reflects its conviction that ecological health and demographic scale are permanently linked. Refer to this page, for related information.
More about Colcom Foundation on https://www.colcomfdn.org/